contrive to find any natural, cosmopolitan,
indisputable unit of value, whose fixity every
one must admit as freely as the length of
the meridian or the weight of water at a
given temperature, such a unit would be
applicable and common not only to England
and France, but to every country between
the equator and the poles; and then, and
not before, we could have a uniform and
universal currency all the world over. You
might walk into a shop in some Chinese
Regent Street, or Boulevards des Italiens, and
tender the same denomination of cash, and
receive the same denomination of change, as
you would in Cheapside. Let us try, then, if
we can catch the unit of value, bring him home
prisoner, and put him to task-work to grind
in a money-mill, like a captive Samson.

At once let us boldly make up our minds
to the fact that there is no relationship or
connection whatever between the franc, or
the sovereign, and the terrestrial meridian,
or any other standard of the kind that can
be mentioned. The savans who composed
the commission of the year eleven, would not
have made such a blunder had a single member
of their learned body been a disciple of
Turgot, or of Adam Smith. Their only excuse
is their earnest desire to introduce the
same precision in the measure of value as
they had in the measures of length, weight,
and capacity. Clearly, the law of the year
eleven was inspired by prejudice and the spirit
of system and uniformity; and those are the
corks which still buoy it up, and prevent it
from sinking. Learned men now and then
condescend to flatter the errors of the
commonalty. Moreover, those reformers had
scarcely a choice allowed them; do it they
must: it was compulsory, on pain of guillotine,
to apply the metrical system, right or
wrong, to everything. But Adam Smith was
the first to lay down the axiom, now universally
admitted by political economists, that
LABOUR is the primitive money, by means of
which everything is purchased; and that he
who wishes for the legal possession of any
object offered for sale, is obliged to yield in
exchange for it a quantity of labour equivalent
to that required to produce the object.
In other words, Labour is the measure of
Value; by it, all things are produced and
acquired; and from it, things receive their
exchangeable value.

From time immemorial, the monetary unit
has been a certain weight of metal. Even
now, it is the popular belief that there exist
in nature special productions, gold and silver,
and also gems, whose value is fixed and
invariable. Experience proves the contrary; it
demonstrates that gold and silver, like all
other products, are subject to changes and
oscillations which, even though unfrequent,
are not the less appreciable. The precious
metals, which constitute the material of coin,
are subject to the law of labour. Their
brilliancy, density, inalterability; their extreme
divisibility, their power of compressing a
large amount of value into a small volume,
have doubtless contributed to their being
accepted as the instrument of exchange; but,
what establishes their value, is neither their
metallic material nor its inherent qualities,
but, as economists unanimously declare, the
labour without which they cannot be
obtained. The mines of Potosi formerly
occasioned a great depression in the value of
silver, because the quantities of labour—the
sum of the efforts and sacrifices of all kinds
—required to extract a pound of silver there,
was less than the corresponding amount in
any other mine. In Ricardo's words, "the
cost of production" was less, at the same
time that the production was on a more
extended scale. This is the true sense in
which to understand the words, "The mine
of Potosi was a very rich mine." The same
conditions are now fulfilled, in respect to
gold, by the mines of California and Australia.
When, therefore, it was requisite to calculate
and discover what ought to be the
monetary unit, the philosophers charged
with that arduous task ought to have
proposed to themselves something more than
to fix the relation between the weight of
coins and the metrical unit; they ought to
have determined what amount of labour
should enter into the monetary unit which
they proposed to adopt. In one word; at
the same time that they established the
material standard, they ought to have
established the labour standard.

It follows, that an equitable monetary law
should no longer take for its base a certain
weight either of silver or of gold, but must
adopt the only true and actual value—that
which serves as the basis and measure of all
other values—labour, measured by time. In
reality, the relations of human labour have
reference to time, and not to space. "Time is
money," says the proverb, more truly and
more philosophically than may be suspected
at first sight. If that element of value is
incorporated in a certain weight of gold,
silver, or copper, the proceeding is only
rational, and in the majority of cases very
convenient. But it should not be forgotten
that it is the labour which constitutes the
value, and not the material with which it is
incorporated. The idea of substituting a
labour-standard for a metallic standard has
made a profound impression on many thoughtful
observers. Indeed, such a substitution
would seem to be the natural consequence of
the adoption of paper money. It would be
the realisation of Turgot's maxim: All
merchandise has the two essential properties of
money; namely, it measures, and also represents,
all values; and in this sense, all merchandise
is money. The new standard would
consequently borrow its divisions and its
multiples from the measures of time. For
instance, to take a division proposed by M. de
Girardin, the minute of labour would represent